E-commerce is big business. In the first quarter of 2016, online sales in the U.S. represented nearly 8 percent of all retail sales, totaling $86.3 billion. With so many consumers tracking towards online retail, e-tailers need to spend the right kind of resources to capture them and convert those clicks into revenue. Your products can’t speak for themselves. Are you telling their story to your customers in a way that leads to discoverability?

How Well Are You Telling Your Products’ Stories?

Retailers have a common set of problems that they need to address on a daily basis. New products, large influxes of customers and product data to manage, consumer electronic product upgrade cycles, and product fulfillment requirements understandably take a company’s focus away from effective website optimization. Running a business and satisfying your customers pulls everyone’s attention away from robust content management. That content management, though, is one of the key components of your business’s overall health.

Diagnosing Your Content Health

Each new product page is a golden opportunity for both discoverability and conversion. If pages are not formatted and written properly, you’re missing out on high-ranking results on Google and other key marketplace sites. Broken formatting issues include:

Missing keywords

Proper keyword density

Short titles and descriptions without H1 or H2 tags

Inadequate product descriptions

Missing product images

Broken metadata, including missing attributions

There is a complex process which ultimately helps your company show up at the top of search results. This process needs to be addressed holistically and regularly. Even companies with localized SEO and digital marketing teams need support in converting and formatting every single product page effectively.

An effective content strategy includes:

Identifying and Ranking SEO Opportunities

Measuring Overall Content Health

Verifying Search Visibility

Grouping and Managing Product Pages

Reformatting and Rewriting Content

E-tailers have daily opportunities to capture and educate their customers. Buying guides and comprehensive category pages work in concert with product pages to drill down into advantages, highlighting feature and benefit language throughout so that your company becomes an authority that helps each customer make informed buying decisions. Guides and category pages further redirect consumers to qualified product pages, all of which have been optimized for premium search engine placement.

Using a third-party platform to manage website health frees up your marketing team to focus on forward-looking opportunities and strategies while maximizing the efficacy of your SEO staff and their expertise. Advanced publishing management software, along with a team of experienced project managers, keyword researchers, writers, and editors working in tandem with your company to restructure your content improves rankings and increases your bottom line. Your online sales funnel is as dynamic as your suite of products. Effective oversight requires daily management, strategic input, and an automated content funnel that takes each page from creation to editing and on to publication.

Rebooting Your Web Content

Are your product descriptions too long? Are they too short? Is your team aware of the latest Google update? How do those constant changes in search and marketplace algorithms impact your rankings? These questions need to be applied consistently to every product and content page, ideally before they go live.

Recently, Deepak and I did a webinar on the impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence on e-commerce content. Machine learning is a huge part of mainstream business practices. According to some research, the artificial intelligence market is expected to be worth $16B by 2022, growing at an average rate of 63 percent from where we are in 2016.

Can you imagine the intensity of this growth? It’s going to have a massive impact on nearly everything we do. We’re already seeing the first ripples of it in both consumer and enterprise businesses: think bots like Alexa.

At CrewMachine, we build e-commerce content for large brands. Our platform is elegantly designed to optimize any type of e-commerce content by identifying blaring gaps, enriching them, and then measuring for building the machine’s intelligence over time.

In this webinar, we talked about how we are at the front line of this exciting new innovation. We’re integrating the concepts of machine learning and AI to create specialized e-commerce content and speed up the content production cycle.

Machine Learning and AI Will Enable Human-Powered Content in E-commerce

Artificial Intelligence has widespread usage across most e-commerce applications, but our focus is on e-commerce content. Why? Because e-commerce content is all about scale. We talk about SKU’s in terms of millions and trillions.

To handle these millions and trillions, you need to think beyond human-powered content production. You need to understand how machine learning can be leveraged to help human-created content. CrewMachine includes AI-generated content modules to solve this burning need.

How It All Comes Together

In our webinar, we discussed big data and the magnitude of data growth. It is growing at a rate of 40 percent and we are looking at around 45 ZB (whatever that means) of data by 2020. The e-commerce industry’s massive growth is a big unknown. The B2C e-commerce industry is pegged $2.35 trillion by 2017.

As we look to the future, e-Commerce is going to be data-driven and powered by predictive analytics, personalization, and other machine-learning related issues. There’s another data point around the robotics and AI wave, also classified as the fourth wave connecting more than 50B devices in 2020. We did the math and decided to incorporate AI and Machine Learning in CrewMachine’s design DNA to resolve e-commerce content headaches like abandoned carts, returned items, lost brand trust and more.

The big question – Want to know how we are driving this innovation? There’s so much terminology with machine learning and AI especially as it is used for e-commerce. Interested in which components we are using the most and wondering how can we explain it all clearly?